As mom and dad prepped for takeoff, their kid was left as a castoff.
An unnamed mother and father allegedly abandoned a 10-year-old boy at an unidentified airport in Spain after realizing they didn’t pack all of the tot’s necessary travel documents.
Unwilling to miss their flight, the jet-setters boarded the airbus, leaving their son in the airport terminal, where a family member would eventually — hopefully — retrieve him.
“[The kid] told [police] that his parents were on the plane, on their way to their home country for vacation,” said Lilian, a purported air-operations coordinator at the plane station where the incident occurred.
She detailed the chaos to over 320,000 TikTok viewers. Her claims, however, have not yet been verified.
“The explanation given to [the authorities] was that the child was traveling with an expired passport from Spain, and needed a travel visa,” said Lilian, speaking Spanish in the clip. “Since he didn’t have a visa, they left the kid in the terminal and called a relative to pick him up.”
“I didn’t see it as normal,” she noted. “The police didn’t see it as normal either.”
Sure, most airlines allow children to fly alone — but leaving an unaccompanied minor alone in the airport just doesn’t fly with most people worldwide.
Still, accidents do happen.
A couple in Germany forgot their five-year-old daughter at Berlin’s Stuttgart Airport back in 2018, claiming they’d each thought the other parent had taken charge of the girl.
More recently, an unattended two-year-old was swept away on a luggage conveyor belt at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport in late May.
But Lilian, a mother of a now-adult daughter, says the abandonment of the 10-year-old boy was the most “surreal” situation she’s ever experienced as an airport employee.
“Hallucinating?” she questioned of the kid’s folks.
“I’m an air traffic controller, and as a controller, I’ve seen a lot of things, but this has been completely surreal,” Lilian groaned. “I’m amazed to think how parents could possibly leave their ten-year-old son at the terminal because he can’t travel due to documentation issues.”
She continued giving the unidentified dopes a harsh tongue lashing for putting their son’s safety at risk.
“They call a relative, who might take half an hour, an hour or three hours, and they calmly board the flight and leave the child behind,” she spat. “As a mother, I’d freak out.”
Lilian reported that airport cops ultimately removed the parents’ luggage from the flight and brought the pair to the on-site police station for questioning.
It’s unclear whether the boy’s parents were arrested.
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